Imagine turning in your homework that you spent days working on checking and re-checking. Then imagine your teacher showing it to the entire campus and publishing it on the Web so that anyone in the world could see it. Critics might mumble under their breath about it, while others might praise it. All of that just for some homework? Yeesh, right?

Welcome to The Tech Talk staff’s reality. For those of you who are familiar with our staff, you’ll notice all of the members of the team happen to be undergraduate journalism majors or minors. That’s because The Tech Talk is a credit lab, just like that engineering or education one you might be enrolled in.

Our staff understands this course is a little different than others, though. For instance, one little mistake in our homework might mean destroying someone’s reputation or even resulting with us being sued.

So, we strive to be professional and to publish accurate information.

So far this school year, we have had to publish one correction. Some items were inaccurate in a story and called to our attention. We realized our mistake and fixed it. One correction for six papers is minimal, considering the copy of The New York Times on my desk right now has five corrections listed for one paper.

OK, I know what you are thinking. Journalists have a job to get the information right. It’s so true, and we at The Tech Talk make every effort to publish ONLY accurate facts, quotes and personal identifications.

I recently received a letter from an upset reader claiming that “Through the years here at Tech, I have heard numerous accounts of individuals (including myself) being misquoted, glaring issues with students’ respective majors and year, as well as more than a few random incorrect facts.”

To that reader and to the rest of you, I have two ideas on how we can ensure that The Tech Talk is always 100 percent accurate.

1. Just as you might have heard numerous accounts of The Tech Talk providing false information, our staff has heard numerous accounts of sources giving false information. A prominent graduate student recently thought it would be funny to provide a wrong classification and major for himself during an interview, and one of our editors knew him well enough to catch the mistake. When asked why he did it, his response was “The Tech Talk should know it. The reporter can find that out.” Isn’t that exactly what our reporter was doing? We would have figured the source would be pretty reliable. Come on sources, cut us some slack.

2. If you spot a mistake, call The Tech Talk office at 257-4946 and tell an editor. We will immediately run a correction if the information we reported is wrong or misleading. As far as being misquoted, keep in mind everyone has quote shock when you read it in print (I’ve even had it!) Sometimes you don’t remember how you spoke during the interview, and it’s easy to blame it on being misquoted. Rest assured our reporters have been trained to get full quotes and some even use tape recorders to make sure every quote is accurate. However, if you know for a fact you didn’t say what was printed, let an editor know.

Remember, this is a course, so mistakes must be brought to our attention so we can all learn from them.

 

Julie Miller is a senior journalism major from Shreveport and serves as editor for The Tech Talk. E-mail comments to jem028@latech.edu.